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The Real Fight Over Fake News

“The Daily Show” is a bellwether for the evolution of Internet video. It is also one of those programs that signify for people why they pay so much money for cable.

Until recently, few of the main made-for-cable programs have been available to watch in full over the Internet, even as broadcast networks have started streaming full episodes of most of their shows. The reason is that cable and satellite systems pay large fees to networks for what they have seen as exclusive rights to their content. (Their deals with broadcast networks are less restrictive.)

In recent months, that has started to change as programs such as USA’s “Monk” and “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne” on TBS become available on the Internet. But many other signature cable programs, like ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and CNN’s “Larry King Live” are not regularly Webcast in their entirety.

That’s why my eyebrows jumped when I saw the announcement last week that full episodes of three Comedy Central shows — “The Daily Show,” “The Colbert Report” and “South Park” — will start being Webcast, both on MTV-owned sites and on the Fancast site from Comcast. (Comedy Central, which is owned by Viacom’s MTV Networks unit, has been Webcasting “South Park” episodes for a few months.)

Just last November, Comedy Central told me that it was not putting full episodes on the redesigned site for “The Daily Show” because of its deal with the cable operators. Instead, it created an awkward compromise in which a series of “clips” from the show would play one after another so users could see all the content from the show. But these clips couldn’t be expanded to the full computer screen, and they didn’t include the opening titles that help create the feeling of a television show.

It’s taken me several days of going back and forth with representatives of both MTV Networks and Comcast to figure out what has changed. I can’t say that I’ve entirely succeeded. The deals between cable companies and networks are dark and nuanced documents with many overlapping quid pro quos.

It turns out MTV’s main deals with cable operators these days do give it the right to distribute all of its content online, said Mark Jafar, an MTV spokesman. And indeed it has started Webcasting some of its signature programs like “The Hills” and “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Comedy Central, however, was under a different set of contracts until early this year because Viacom only bought the network in 2003.

The Webcasting trend is not pleasing the large cable operators. Indeed, when Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, was asked recently how he feels about the cable networks putting more content online, he said “Guess what? We do mind.”

Webcasting a program the same day it is broadcast, “will erode your other business model,” Mr. Britt said at the Cable Show in New Orleans earlier this month. If this happens, he said, “we have to intervene at some point.”

Alexander Dudley, a Time Warner Cable spokesman, elaborated when I asked him about Viacom’s move to Webcast full episodes of “The Daily Show.”

“They can’t have it both ways,” he said. “If they put content they ask cable companies to pay for online for free, they are making it less valuable and we should be expected to pay less for it.”

When I asked Comcast the same question, a spokeswoman also expressed some concern about making sure that some of the programming it pays for remains exclusive. But Comcast is not as outraged as Time Warner. One reason is that the company’s experience with offering video-on-demand versions of cable programs appears to have increased viewership of its traditional channels. As a result, it is less worried that online streaming might divert paying customers.

Comcast, unlike Time Warner, also has its own Internet streaming service, Fancast, that can profit from the move to Internet viewing. And it is using its relationships with cable networks to get programming for it. MTV said it is looking to syndicate Comedy Central programs to other online sites as well.

MTV, of course, is very much trying to have it both ways. Its core audience is increasingly moving from watching clips on YouTube to watching full episodes on Hulu and the broadcast network Web sites. Yet, as Mr. Jafir made clear in an e-mail to me, the company also needs to defer to the cable companies, known sometimes as MSOs, that provide so much of its revenue today:

We’ve always worked hard, and we continue to work hard, to strike the right balance between protecting and growing the businesses of our MSO partners and being wherever our audiences are consuming entertainment….We’re definitely not in the business of making all our content available for “free” anywhere — monetization and preservation of the value of our content is a strategic priority for all our distribution across platforms.

I feel that a lot of these webcast shows are excellent advertising for the cable broadcasts. I can’t really speak in regards to the Daily Show, since I’ve been a fan for years and have rarely missed an episode since Stewart took the reins in 1999, but I can give another example: I rarely watched shows on The Cartoon Network until I started watching full episodes on their “Adult Swim Fix” web page. I got hooked on several of their shows and am now a regular viewer of their cable broadcasts, which have much better clarity and resolution. I still watch the webcasts when I miss a show, but mostly I use them to turn my friends on to new stuff they might not have seen.

The fact is everything that can move online is slowing moving online. This includes all types of media. As a creator or distributor of media, the question then becomes: do you try to grab a piece of the pie early on or do you fight it to the death? Your death that is. We’ve seen how successful the record companies have been at it. These people should realise they’re better off working together to a good solution rather than arguing over deck chairs on the Titanic.

We actually just canceled our cable – we only regularly watched Colbert, Daily Show and a bunch of kid shows. We get the kid shows from Netflix and watch the others online. We also have a digital tuner in the TV to pick up PBS (4 stations in Boston) and all the networks – it’s HD and looks better than the compressed cable signal! We even canceled our Tivo account (you can still use it to pause live tv). All together we save just over $100 per month and are happy to be free of “bundles”, useless channels, etc.

When cable was first introduced years ago, its pitch went like this: “The reason you pay for cable is because there are no commercials.”

The cable companies are making millions and millions on their overpriced product and they slam us with commercials as well.

Seems like they are trying to have it both ways as well.

Seems like corporate America is always trying to have it both ways. One day We will all stand up and fight being raped as we are. Our government does not protect the common man. It has been a protector of the corporation for decades. This is the core problem with America. It has become CorpAmerica. America no longer exists.

Full episodes of all of these shows are already available online anyway, on dozens of different sites. Oftentimes these sites are down or out of sync, but my friends and I still watch them because there’s no legitimate source for South Park on demand. In my opinion, it will benefit Comedy Central to take control of the situation and follow suit, at least in terms of advertising and ad revenue.

Broadcast TV is practically dead. And once their business model becomes a loss leader for the media companies that will own them, cable and satellite companies will have to make their money selling internet and phone access. My children don’t watch TV or cable. They watch TV shows on their computers and watch Hulu, YouTube, or buy shows in iTunes. My daughter has watched seasons of House and The Simpsons, but never on TV. In another 10 years, when they have buying power I doubt broadcasters, TV manufacturers, and cable companies will be in the same business they are today.

While MTV is trying to have it both ways, so are the cable companies, crying when the TV side of their business is being cannibalized by the internet side of the business. Comcast is particularly evil by packet shaping and killing P2P connections to prevent people from sharing data.

Comcast and the other common carriers are just maximizing revenue (in an evil manner) because when the end comes, it will come fast and without warning.

I am not a computer expert, nor a web fanatic, but when I bought a $600 laptop two years ago, it came with an “S” connector to TV. One day I connected it and all of the sudden I was watching streamed video on the TV. Since then image quality has become almost DVD-like and more and more programming and movies are available, so this year I canceled cable altogether. I will be willing to go back to cable if they charged about $5 a month for the hook up (with basic channels), $0.50 per half hour shows and $1 per one hour episodes; plus about $5 for a just released movie and $3 for a more-than-a-year-old movie (all on demand). But it seems that it is going to take content producers and cable companies more than 20 years to figure it out.

@dennis in comment #2, I agree that all entertainment media is slowly moving to have an online presence. But the major movie and TV entertainment companies are determined to prevent what happened to the music industry from occurring in their industry.

And if a company with as large a presence as Microsoft is willing to help them with Digital Rights Management (DRM) software, then deepens their effort by coordinating their DRM software with hardware-encoded PC equipment manufacturers, most consumers will be powerless to make end runs around copyright protection schemes for videos of TV shows and movies.

Consumers have shown a willingness to pay reasonable amounts for clean, clear videos and music reproductions as opposed to crummy, pirated copies downloaded surreptitiously on peer-to-peer networks that are full of PC malware that arrive along with the content.

Apple has succeeded wildly in selling protected music on iTunes. Even though Steve Jobs said he wished the major music labels would release unprotected versions of their songs, the music on iTunes remains in a proprietary Apple format unplayable on regular MP3 players without re-ripping the songs.

I think there will remain a mix of protected and unprotected content on the Web into the foreseeable future. But gradually, more and more of it will involve either embedded advertisements that are unremovable without destruction of the content, or else the content will be fee-based as iTunes is.

One of the obvious things about the Web in the past 10 years is the consolidation of Web-page ‘real estate’ into the hands of fewer and fewer large companies and their well-disguised subsidiaries. It used to be one could find several honest, actual reviews of a household appliance or electronics product by Googling about it.

Now the first 2 or 3 Google pages of links will be aggregator sites and dummy pages that lead back to product-shilling Web pages with glossy ‘fake’ reviews. Amazon’s user-written reviews are one exception to this trend, but Amazon is itself one of these enormous companies who increasingly dominate the ‘e-airwaves’.

The Web is becoming the new TV, with more buttons and knobs, but the same mass-marketing that is everywhere else in America.

Am I the only one who’s noticed the drastic decline in the quality of The Daily Show over the last three years? Seriously, it’s barely watchable…John Stewart, screeches, mugs, then drops a bleeped-out f-bomb when he’s really desperate. The show has no value as exclusive content–that’s what has changed since the initial compromise with cable operators.

It is hysterical to hear the cable industry be upset about this issue, since what really chaps them is that they might not get multiple opportunities to clean out your wallet. Most people already pay nearly $50 a month for the cable broadband connection that makes watching a streaming webcast practical, and you can bet if we’re forced to watch these webcasts via a cable owned portal such as “Fancast”, there will be additional opportunities for advertising revenue on the site. Don’t forget there are still commercials (though “limited”) in the program itself! So the “business model” that the cable companies want to protect is the same one they have had with traditional “over the air” broadcasters–who they paid nothing to for years as they carried those signals and now fight tooth and nail to keep from paying anything substantial to (even though they are still the most popular programs in terms of viewers) because cable still can claim “those signals are available over the air for free.” So how long do you think it will be before you’ll see those broadband rates start heading up at the same three or four times the rate of inflation that cable tv rates have for the past two decades?

I live in Europe and am a fan of both the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. The Daily Show is available on cable, but the Colbert Report isn’t – or at least not on any package I can get. So I started watching the Colbert Report online, and now I tend to watch the segments I’m interested in from The Daily Show online as well, rather than bothering to turn on the tv to watch it at a specific time and having to sit through the bits I’m not interested in. There are ads online, but many fewer than I’d have to sit through watching tv.

So, from my small sample (myself only, and non-US), I think cable networks may have something to worry about, particularly since the audiences for these particular Comedy Central Shows are extremely Internet active.

“This means nothing. The Daily Show and every other TV program on cable has been available via bitTorrent for years to all and sundry.” — Posted by Jolly Rogers

Jolly Rogers: You just wanted to use the word sundry. And by the way, the overwhelming majority of Americans have zero interest in using bitTorrent to watch television.

One of the main points of this article is that Viacom and Comcast are looking to find more direct-to-consumer modes of distribution. Webcasting works, in theory, but consumers still want to consume a finished product and no one’s solved all the caveats yet: full-screen resolution, no buffering, simple access.. and can you watch it on your TV?

When, oh when, will cable realize that it can make bucketloads of money by providing a la carte service????
I worked for Sony during the dark days of the beginning of Napster, and remember clearly thinking (and mentioning) that my generation (then in my 20s) would like to be able to buy single releases online… I heard the laughter then, and can hear it now from these antiquated cable companies.
They are going to go down if they don’t change their business model.

This is sounding like the “RIAA vs The Internet, et al” and could get ugly.

I don’t watch much TV content on my computer, but could, certainly. Then again, we only pay for PBS and “Japan TV” on our DishNetwork subscription. NetFlix is our source of choice for most entertainment.

As some above have noted, I also will link to web clips to introduce or share a good clip to someone, just as I might burn a sample CD for a friend. I don’t see it as piracy but as sharing my tastes with someone who will likely also enjoy it… not unlike FM and AM radio used to play good, new music.

If a person can’t easily hear or see new music or television, how can it spread to a new audience? I understand if cable companies had genuine competition from the Web, but as far as I can see, they don’t. Only a very few knuckleheads are cheap enough to make it worthwhile.

A bigger issue is the lack of a-la-carte programming options, and the high cost of cable subscription in general. I resent my subscription fees going to pay for channels I not only don’t like but find crass and offensive.

It’s pretty sad that Comcast is so far ahead of TW when it comes to running a streaming video service, considering that TW is the sole broadband Internet provider in much of its market, and shares a corporate parent with one of the Internet’s oldest (if much maligned) brands. Just another example of neither AOL nor Time Warner having much of a clue as to what to do with the Internet, I guess.

I watch Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block through their website, and prefer to watch TV shows that way.

We stopped subscribing to cable when we moved between cities a few years back. Incidentally, we didn’t stop subscribing to cable because of internet access to TV shows (which we didn’t even know about at the time.) We stopped subscribing to cable because we watched so little TV in the first place that our actual viewing time worked out to over $10 an hour — and we’d never even subscribed to premium channels like HBO! It was cheaper for infrequent TV watchers like us to subscribe to a service like Netflix. And our ISP is a cable company (we use them for both internet and phone, just not cable.) Since almost all home internet access now is through cable companies, it makes sense that what we think of as “television” is going to move in this direction anyway.

It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve watched a TV show that wasn’t on a DVD or downloaded from the internet in some fashion. I call up the cable company every couple of months to find out if I can get cable without sending any money to Fox News, but so far the cable company doesn’t want my business.